Trevor's Blog

Trevor is learning Wing Chun, the form of Kung Fu that formed the base of Bruce Lee’s technique. He recently attended a seminar with the leading practitioner of his style in Europe and, having just been invited to become a monthly contributor to the magazine, took the opportunity to question him.

In a fascinating article you can read in full by clicking on the link at the end of this blog Sharon Begley relates some recent research that shows that, despite it being six million years since apes and humans split from our common ancestor, they are still able to understand our emotional expressions. even more amazing is that they seem to understand how our expressions relate to an internal state that leads to an action.

I see Cognitive Hypnotherapy as sitting comfortably beneath the CBT umbrella (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), but where most in this discipline think that emotions arise as a result of our thoughts, our practitioners hold the view that emotion comes first and the thoughts we have are an interpretation of an existing state, so both have to be given attention. This makes more sense from an evolutionary point of view, and this research appears to support the primacy (in terms of age) of the emotional system .

Here’s the article

Trevor continues his explanation of how our approach can often bring rapid improvement for this condition.

I’m not a great one for sitting about; relaxing for me is usually some kind of activity like running or martial arts. However this year I have been working on adjusting the balance between ‘doing’ and ‘being’, and I’ve found that giving myself more time and space to watch the world has opened up my levels of appreciation enormously, and with it my sense of wellbeing. Rubin Battino once gave a very special seminar for the members of Quest. He has worked with many terminally people and he made the comment that, at the end of life, all that’s left that matters is people and nature. I’ve found that, when I do less, these are the two things my appreciation turns to. And they’re the first things that drop out of my awareness when I get busy. maybe there’s something important in that.

This was posted in one of the Quest forum, and I thought it fitted beautifully with this general theme. Have a good journey today, and appreciate the people in your life, and the nature that surrounds you. Whatever your troubles, the birds are still singing.

In this article Trevor uses examples from the mindsets of elite athletes to show how you can use your mind to push you to even higher levels of performance.

There are many people who urgently need help with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder PTSD, many of them from the armed and emergency services. This article is similar to the one in Police Professional, and will soon appear in a number of others in order to educate the right people about the potential of our approach.

It has long been a basic proposition of rapport building within Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) that people unconsciously trust those who are most like them. This has led to the idea of matching or mirroring other people’s physiology or modes of speech in order to build an unconscious positive connection. Done well, I’ve found that it works extremely well, and is a basic skill that we teach our Cognitive Hypnotherapy students.

Now evidence from a study conducted by researchers at St Andrews University has validated this approach. Scientists used computer graphics to manipulate men’s faces before women rated their attractiveness.

The faces were made to look more or less masculine by altering areas including jaw lines, and more or less like the women who rated them as part of the research.

It was found that women both trusted the men who most resembled them, and found them most attractive. The full story can be found here.

A new study by evolutionary psychologists at the University of California have discovered a link between male strength, female beauty, and anger levels. Apparently the greater your upper body strength (if male) or your level of attractiveness (if female) the more likely it is that you anger easily.

The authors suggest that anger evolved as part of a bargaining mechanism in situations where you feel you are not being treated as you should. The stronger you are the more confident you would feel in the loss your protagonist will suffer in a fight, and the prettier you are the more benefit you can confer on them.

You can read the full report here.

With anger’s obvious survival role in the fight or flight response, it’s interesting to read a theory that suggests an adaptation of it for social communication; I’d never thought of it like that, but when I think of it people who are angry are trying to communicate something.

In therapy I have found that people’s issues with anger fall into two camps; one group can’t control it, and the other can’t express it. Both can have serious consequences to health and social success. In both cases – while I accept there may be a genetic component at play – which camp you fall into tends to depend on what you learned as a child. If you were never allowed to express you anger (or lost the approval of a parent when you did so), or if you got your own way by being aggressive, then it tends to condition you to that response in adulthood. Either of which can be dealt with quite quickly with Cognitive Hypnotherapy. There are quite a few footballers who spring to mind…

As an ex-police officer, Trevor has a particular interest in working with people suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In this article for Police Professional he outlines what the condition is, and how people can be helped using Cognitive Hypnotherapy.

It seems that neuroscience is adding to the evidence everyday that our memories are not only being adjusted according to our current experiences, but that just the act of remembering them can change them.

It’s a difficult idea to like, but the evidence is pointing to the fact that when we remember our past, it didn’t actually happen – at least not how we remember it.

This is something we, as Cognitive Hypnotherapists have been utilising in our work for a very long time. We all have an inherent ability to change the way we remember things; a good therapist can help you use this ability to let go of past abuse, or events that have led to limiting beliefs or a lack of self-esteem. It is possible to re-write yourself. In this excellent article, the only shame is that all the neuroscientists are loking at is how to use drugs to facilitate this kind of change, when we already have natural tools to achieve the same thing.